Treasure, Thrown Away

In this week’s issue of the magazine, Sarah Stillman writes about confidential informants in her article “The Throwaways.” Peter van Agtmael, commissioned to photograph the piece, travelled to Florida and Detroit to photograph the families of two of the informants that Stillman writes about.

In Detroit, van Agtmael initially spent two days with Lyniece Nelson, Shelly (Treasure) Hilliard’s mother, and other members of her family. Hilliard had been murdered six months earlier, after being caught by police with less than an ounce of marijuana and agreeing to set up her drug dealer in order to avoid prosecution. “Sometimes a photograph feels sufficient to evoke the emotions of a situation,” van Agtmael wrote of the trip. But he wanted more time with Treasure’s family, so he returned with Gaia Squarci, and together they collected video and audio, and photographed more of Treasure’s family, producing this multimedia piece with the hopes of conveying “some sense of one family’s reckoning with the sudden murder of their loved one.”